Writing is a common activity among a variety of professional and scholastic disciplines. Every person who receives an education in the United States, and many other countries, will likely be required to write a paper for a class. Many professions require writing of technical papers, reports, articles, or operative documents.
Searching for relevant sources for a written work is often a time consuming and laborious process. In order to find these details an author must stop writing and take time to search through a library, database, text, or the Internet. The author must then incorporate the data found into their written work. A machine and computer-implemented process which automatically searches databases and uses Internet search technologies to gather data and provide literary citation suggestions in real-time as the author is writing their work would save the author time and energy. An invention that allowed users to select the desired information from a list of suggestions and then incorporated user selected information into the written work with the correctly formatted citation and bibliography information would save authors time in research and citation of sources.
Correct formatting and citation of sources in a written work is required in many types of writing disciplines and professions. One individual may be called upon to write works in different disciplines or professions over the course of their lives. A system, method, and/or process for automatically formatting written works to the required style would be helpful to the user.
Citation to sources is required in many types of writing. Academic papers, scholarly articles, legal writing, textbooks, magazine articles, and Internet publications are some of the written works which sometimes require citation to the sources of the information contained in these written works. Citations are required to be formatted in a standard form depending on the style of the document being written. The elements of a typical citation generally contain information regarding the author, title of the work cited, page numbers of the relevant sections of the cited work and information regarding the publisher of the cited document and the year published. The order and style of these citation elements are dictated by the rules of each style format for writing. Citation rules vary based on the format required by the author. When an author is writing a written work their writing is expected to follow a certain stylistic format (for example: APA style is used in the field of psychology and political science; MLA style is used by English writing; Chicago style is used by history and religion). The citation and formatting rules for each style often differ in the way that papers are structured, especially in the way that sources for information are formatted and publishing authorship of sources information is arranged within the citation.
Citation of sources is often a time consuming and labor intensive task. Even more time consuming can be the task of finding sources for information presented in a written work. Often an author is familiar with an idea or the subject matter on which they are writing without knowing specific details. The author must then provide a citation to the reference from which the information was gathered.
Students often loose grading points for incorrectly formatting sources and citing sources in scholastic papers because of unfamiliarity with the technical citation differences between styles. An invention which would correctly format both the written work and the sources for the information selected by the user would be very helpful.
There are many fields where the need to find and incorporate information as described above can be useful. Any field that requires a “next step” would benefit from the above described invention. Many professions require finding a solution, diagnosis, prescription or other information; finding that information is often time consuming and requires sorting through many possibilities. It would be helpful for a professional to be able to enter information regarding a problem or project into a system and while they are entering such information the invention would automatically search databases or selected information sources and suggest solutions to the problem presented in real time.
In the area of legal writing a user often needs to find information or cite information. The described invention would be useful for suggestion case citations and providing information in real time to the author of a writing.
1. Technical Field
The present invention is generally directed to assisting with authorship of written works in various style formats and disciplines and to automatic citation suggestion and implementation into written works based upon integrated real-time database and world wide web search criteria and user defined parameters. The present invention provides a computer-implemented process and machine for filtering and automatically manipulating data resulting from existing search technologies and then allowing the user to automatically integrate relevant data, as well as a properly formatted citation into a written work. They machine and process also can suggest the next step in a medical, legal or engineering process from searching a database in real time.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There is no known machine or computer-implemented process in the Prior Art, which performs the function of this machine and computer-implemented process.
Present computer-implemented processes and machines for citation search consist of a user physically searching a library catalog, other searchable database or the world wide web. Once an entry, document, or written work, are found which satisfy the user's query, that entry then must be read the user who must then select the relevant information. Once relevant information is selected, the user must manually format the citation of the reference they have found.
Prior art consists of computer-implemented processes of automatic formatting in a user selected style of user entered information. For example, if a user wished to format a citation in MLA format, a user could use prior art to enter information for the author, publication, page and date, of a source. Prior art would then organize and render the user entered data in the correct format.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,289,342 and 6,738,780 disclose a system which parses citations from papers and identifies citations to the same paper that may differ in syntax as well as extracting and providing the context of citations to a given paper, allowing a researcher to determine what is published in other papers about a given paper.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,028,259 discloses a method for verifying stylistic accuracy of existing legal citations, and for displaying and implementing corrections of inaccurate legal citations.
No prior art has been found which automatically provides information and citation suggestions in real time or that allows an author to incorporate selected citations directly into a written work.